About Karl Guttag

Karl Guttag has 40 years of experience in Graphics and Image Processors, Digital Signal Processing (DSP), memory architecture, display devices (LCOS and DLP) and display systems including Heads Up Displays and Near Eye Display (augmented reality and virtual reality). For the last 35 years was generally the lead technical person on the design and/or system product rising to TI Fellow at Texas Instruments and being the CTO at three startups.

Most recently he was CTO of Navdy a startup working on automotive heads up displays. Prior Navdy he was the CTO of Syndiant developing LCOS used in projectors and head mount displays. He has also provided technical expert support for I.P. litigation since 1999.

He is named inventor on 150 issued U.S. Patents including key patents related to display devices, graphics/ imaging processors, graphics interface circuits, microprocessors, signal processing (DSP), Synchronous DRAMs, and Video/Graphics DRAM. Billions of dollars of yearly revenue have been attributed to products using these inventions.

Summary: KGOnTech provides independent technical and market consulting in the areas of display and graphics devices and systems. KGOnTech also provides support for intellectual property (IP) litigation including being a technical expert, prior art research, and investigations of infringement.

A list of cases Karl Guttag has worked on since 2002 is included in Appendix A

Date: 2013-05 to 2015-01

Organization: Navdy Inc, San Francisco CA

Title: CTO/CSO

Summary: Navdy is a startup working on an aftermarket automotive Heads Up Display (HUD). Navdy was selected as one of 11 of over 100 companies for the PCH International’s Highway1 Incubator. The company is in the technology development stage of a high volume consumer device. The company raise $6.5M product in 2014 and has over $3M in presales.

Date: 2004-12 to 2011-12

Organization: Syndiant, Inc., Richardson, TX

Title: Founder and CTO

Summary: Syndiant developed Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCOS) display devices for pico projector applications and were based on his inventions. Syndiant has the leadership position in high resolution LCOS microdisplay for small (pico) projectors. The devices have been designed into product marketed by 3M, Philips, and AAXA, among others. Syndiant’s devices and technology were being considered for integration into cell phones by a number of major companies.

As CTO he was the technical leader of the company. He guided other senior engineers, help planned the roadmap for new devices, interfaced with engineers at customers and partner companies, and was the technical spokesperson for the company

Dates: 2001-07 to 2010-12

Organization: Kagutech, Ltd.

Title: President

Summary: For this intellectual property company, Mr. Guttag has invented and has issued Patents on new all digital architectures for Microdisplay Backplanes. The technology he invented at Kagutech by Karl Guttag was exclusively licensed to Syndiant.

Dates: 1998-05 to 2001-06

Organization: Silicon Display Incorporated

Title: CTO

Summary: A startup company working on Liquid Crystal on Silicon for near eye and projector applications. During that time Mr. Guttag was responsible for the architecture of a digital LCOS display device and the FPGA that interfaced to the display device as well as developing LCOS drive algorithms.

Summary: Most of his 20 years at TI was involved with the integrated circuits related to storing and manipulating graphics, imaging, and video data. He was the lead integrated circuit architect of some of TI’s most advanced integrated circuits.

While at TI, he was the technical leader on a number of imaging and graphics related programs. Mr. Guttag was the chief architect of the TMS320C8x (MVP) family (1990-1996) of image processors (which have been often cited in patent/legal procedures against Microunity patents) and the TMS340 family (1984-1989) of programmable graphics processors.

He led the definition of the first Video DRAM (VRAM) which today has become the Graphics DRAM or GDRAM. He also was a significant contributor to the first Synchronous DRAM (SDRAM) that is used in the vast majority of computer systems. He is a named inventor on key early patents related to both the early VRAM and SDRAM.

He led the definition of highly integrated Video Interface Palettes at TI (1984-1989) and other integrated circuits related to graphics systems including a floating point coprocessor for the TMS340 family.

He headed the logic and design architecture of the TMS 9995 (1979) and TMS 99000 (1980-1981) 16-bit microprocessors. His work on these architectures plus his work on the VRAM, led to him being elected as the youngest Senior Member of Technical Staff (SMTS) in the history of TI in 1982.

In 1977 and 1978, he was one of the 6 original engineers on the TMS9918 “Sprite Chip” family (1977-1979) that was used in Colecovision, the Japanese MSX home computer, and TI’s 99/4 home computer. This sprite architecture was later cloned and used by Nintendo in their game systems. He directly worked on the Sprite architecture, DRAM interface definition, and logic verification of the TMS 9918 family (which included the 9918, 9918A, 9928, 9118, and 9128).

Technical consultant including writing claim charts for invalidity and providing technical opinions about claim construction, non-infringement, and issues with the cited patents claims lack of enablement and being indefinite.

Education

BSEE from Bradley University in 1976

MSEE from the University of Michigan 1977

Recognition

He was the youngest person elected to Senior Member of Technical staff after only 4.5 years at TI, and was the youngest person elected to TI Fellow at Texas Instruments, receiving this honor after less than 11 years after joining TI. He was awarded the “Technical Achievement” award by the NCGA in 1988 for his work on the Video RAM. At SID 2011 he won a Distinguished Paper Award for his paper on “Laser+LCOS Technology Revolution.”

Karl Guttag has been an invited speaker and has published numerous papers at many graphics, imaging, and integrated circuit conferences. He has been regularly quoted in most of the major electronics and graphics magazines.

Publications

Karl Guttag has been an invited speaker and has published numerous papers at many graphics, imaging, and integrated circuit conferences over the last 36 years. He has been regularly quoted in most of the major electronics and graphics magazines. His recent publications include:

Patents

To date, 150 U.S. patents have been issued with Karl Guttag as an inventor. A number of the patents have been considered key patents in Texas Instruments’ patent portfolio and have resulted in significant licensing revenue to TI. Most of these patents relate to digital signal processor architecture, graphics and imaging architectures, new DRAM architectures, and video.

Architecture of a chip having multiple processors and multiple memories

56. 5,696,959

Memory store from a selected one of a register pair conditional upon the state of a selected status bit

57. 5,696,954

Three input arithmetic logic unit with shifting means at one input forming a sum/difference of two inputs logically ored with a third input logically ored with the sum/difference logically anded with an inverse of the third input

58. 5,696,913

Unique processor identifier in a multi-processing system having plural memories with a unified address space corresponding to each processor

59. 5,694,348

Method apparatus and system for correlation

60. 5,673,407

Data processor having capability to perform both floating point operations and memory access in response to a single instruction

61. 5,651,127

Guided transfers with variable stepping

62. 5,644,524

Iterative division apparatus, system and method employing left most one’s detection and left most one’s detection with exclusive or

Three input arithmetic logic unit forming the sum of a first input anded with a first boolean combination of a second input and a third input plus a second boolean combination of the second and third inputs

34 comments

Hi Karl; Just a note to say hello. We worked on simmilar aspects of video and I particularly remember a session in Nice checking their design proposals on AVP (Advanved Video Processor). I has moved on and I hope you are still at it as I am. Take care Karl, and I remember the old times. Raj

We make those special screen, I am looking for Pico Projector or any good laser projector. But I like to put this projector very very close the our screen or just above the screen like the LBO did. Do you think it is possible? I have huge application for it. Is any telephone # you can be reached? if I may. My mobile is +86 1391 666 8076
You can just send a MSG to me , let me call you since it is international long distance.

http://www.syndiant.com/tech_advantages.html
Karl, I read this thoroughly, appears syndiant has great technology but never take off, is it all because commercial or marketing? what is your opinion? great products may not be the best selling products?

Michael, I don’t think it is appropriate for me to get into this matter in any specifics with respect to Syndiant.

I will say that the market for pico projectors never really materialized in a big way. Yes there were some attempts and specialty products, but not even volume to sustain device company. The same could be said for Head Mounted Displays. There just are not any high volume device sales to be made. Yes there are specialty products but nothing, including Google Glass, when into the kind of volumes that would sustain and grow display device development. Without volume growth, it is hard to sustain technology and manufacturing development.

Another big issue is that the LCOS manufacturing effort has been very fracture between many companies whereas DLP had a huge investment by a single company, Texas Instruments (reportedly over $1B invested before they sold a device for more than it cost to make). Himax had their other division support the investment in manufacturing (I have heard it was well more than $100M US) that a startup like Syndiant could not afford (at least when I was there).

In short, it looks to be insane how much money has been poured into Magic Leap (over $1B USD). They are working on light field displays which at a minimum require about 10 to 20X information content (not really pixels but the information that would be optically turned into pixels) to be delivered to the eye simultaneously (the focus point of the eye then “chooses” the content that is in focus).

It may “work” for some simple low resolution demos, but how they hope to deliver a product at a cost that is not crazy and that will be worth what it cost would seem to be well more than 10 years away (like delivering a 20K by 20K resolution display complete with all the processing and data bandwidth). It seems like something more appropriate for a few $1M per year research effort, not a full blown company.

I assume you are talking about dimming/blocking the outside/real world so that it is not too bright.

This is certainly something many companies would like to do with their AR systems. To get the display to show up, they can only go so bright before it hurts the person’s eye. There are also companies that want to have pixel or area dimming to selectively light to make the display image opaque/solid.

I have not heard of anyway to do true pixel level dimming as there are issues of parallax (getting the display image to line up with the dimming) and with focus. The “dimming plane” is too close to the eye to be in-focus whereas the display image has optics that moved it’s apparent focus point.

Like many things, dimming the outside world, is one of the things that companies would like to do but there are literally dozens of issues to be solved. Each has to deal with the size, weight, cost, power, and negative image effects (everything you add damages the image a bit) that go with adding a feature.

LCOS is made on silicon semiconductor crystalline substrates and not with Thin Film Transistors (TFT). I don’t know all the I.C. fabs that support LCOS. I know TSMC supports some companies but there are others. LCOS is make with largely common semiconductor process but the top layer/mirror is very special and they use special techniques to create a smooth mirror and reduce the “dimple” due to the electrical contact.

Yes, it is basically the same optical design as the Meta-2. This type of design goes back a long way (particularly with L3/Link). Off the top it lets about 4X the light of the display through and about 2X the light from the real world.

The design has it downsides, particular with distorting the display image among other issues. L3/Link has some pre-correction optics in their designs (which are more military oriented).

There is also another company called DreamWorld that is claiming to do be doing something similar. But they are reportedly being sued by Meta.

Hi Karl- I was wondering about your opinion of the http://maxst.com/revelio/ ? It uses an LCOS RVista50 display and has a wide FOV and is also cheap ($850)…what are the big downsides for this design (it seems to solve the cost issue for a binocular AR display but wonder about the drawbacks of its display tech and whether they are negligible)

From what I can tell, the R-Vista 50 uses a polarized light “birdbath design” that seems pretty efficient. They seem to be only blocking about 50% of the incoming light which suggest they are using polarization rotation films to make the design efficient both in terms of reflecting the display light AND in terms of transmission; at least this part seems to have been done well. 50% is still like wearing light to medium sunglasses but it is much better than non-polarizing birdbath designs.

Because the R-Vista 50 design only covers about 40 degrees of your FOV and the optical “block” cover about 60 degrees of a person’s FOV, you will notice a blurry edge of the optics block. I can say the Maxst Revelio video has 100% fake and not-representative “simulated” views; I could not find any “through the optics” images anywhere on it or the R-Vista 50. Because they are likely using polarizing optics, you will have problems looking at any LCD monitor or display. It would be dangerous to use a headset like this while driving (as shown in the Maxst Revelio video).

They don’t give spec’s for the brightness or contrast of the headset and this is a BIG concern for me. Usually when companies don’t give specs it is because they aren’t good. My guess is that these will not be bright enough for outdoor use but might work indoors.

I don’t have a lot of familiarity with the RaonTech LCOS panel. There are big trade-offs in image quality versus cost that can be made in LCOS. Generally contrast is lower with field sequential color LCOS has you have to use faster but lower contrast Liquid Crystals and also “tune” for one color wavelength (typically green) which means you lose contrast in the other two colors.

I unfortunately did not see the product at CES (apparently it was demonstrated there) and there is not a lot of detail in the available information. There is the general “consumer warning” that if it was a great product, you would hear about it by word of mouth. I would certainly want to try it out before buying one for $850.

Thanks Karl- Looking at the spec sheet it seems that it has a distortion of 3% and transmittance of 40% that does not seem bad at all in terms of real-world usage (whether outside or inside a building)

I can believe the 40% transmittance, basically the loss due to polarizing the real world image. It agrees with my rough calculations based on the pictures. 40% is at the lighter side of “medium/category 2” sunglasses. Typical Polarizing sunglasses are category 3 and in the 10% to 20% transmission range. For indoor use you would like more in the 85% transmission range (do you wear sunglasses indoor?).

Do you know how many nits (cd/m-squared) the glasses put out?

In the end you really need to try them on and see how well they work for you. Do you see the field sequential color breakup? Try out the software as well. ALL the AR glasses these days make severe compromises in one way or another, you have to decide if you can live with them.

sir, you webpage is really amazing and informative. But i have one doubt in one of your page on head mounted display, every prototype that you’ve wrote about forms image near eyes(that is what near eye display do) but to see an image near eye we need a convex lens and no lens is used in any of the prototype. so please explain me how that image is recognized and interpreted by eye.